The Arcade® - Endless Combinations

The Arcade® is our love letter to the pocketknife community. We brainstormed our favorite knife elements and put our own unique Flytanium twist on it. That means solid materials at an affordable price point with emphasis on key features – like Demko Shark-Lock™ technology and multiple customization options. We paired that with S35VN steel - resulting in a drop point blade that's tough, holds an edge well, and resists corrosion. We used the same aluminum that's in airplanes, firefighter rescue ladders, and some AR-15's for our contoured handles. We believe that knives should be an extension of who you are and should reflect your personality. The Arcade® provides that opportunity while first and foremost being a solid EDC.

Designing a knife presents unique challenges – moving one element around affects the entire design of the knife. Our Senior Industrial Designer ran into this when lowering the pivot point to fit the freshly licensed Demko Shark-Lock™ into the body. That led to new obstacles, like how to adjust the body to remain ergonomic but look balanced with the lower pivot and re-designing the knife blade to look proportional both open and closed with a lower point of rotation.

The Arcade® as a whole is an exercise in design. Every component has a purpose, every material chosen with care. Aluminum is notoriously tricky to coat right, the Arcade® finishes are the result of years of work. Our aluminum is textured and grippy while avoiding the chalky feeling aluminum finishes tend to have. There are also steel liners reinforcing parts of the knife to help provide support and strength to the aluminum. This helps us to have a high strength to weight ratio and allows us to pass down savings on materials to consumers.

Another goal when designing this knife was to have inlays that augmented the body without extra parts. Inlays were initially designed with machining on both sides, which was then changed to single side machining. This allowed us to use less material and cut down on waste. The inlays are also designed in a way that doesn’t add additional screws to the construction. Inlays provide the ability to explore materials and options that wouldn’t be feasible for full knife handles.

The latest March release of the Blue Carbon and Gunmetal Ultem knives included multiple aftermarket parts, including highly anticipated titanium handles. Most knives come with an additional G-10 inlay set, as of writing there are nearly 20 different stock options available. As part of the new release, we wanted to check our math on just how many combinations there are for the Arcade®. Mostly just to ensure we had the 50,000 options we listed in our product description was accurate. Turns out we were a little off, by more than a million.

We realized we weren’t thinking big enough, though. You could mix and match inlays, handles, heck even thumbstuds. You could even mix and match the screws! The “technically” correct answer was far higher – along the lines of 5 Quatrillion combinations. As in if each person in the world (7.9 billion) had their own one-of-a-kind Arcade with no duplicates, each person would have over 70,000 unique knives.